Was the Ghost Real?

First of all, let me say that I loved Invisible Ghosts.  I thought it was beautiful and tragic and hopeful.  And the characters were so well developed.  I just saw a patron checking out this book tonight at work and I went on and on and on and on....I know she will love it, too.  I also encouraged her to read others by Robyn Schneider as I think she just gets better and better. 
The one thing I am wondering is, was the ghost of Logan real?  I don't know!  But it doesn't matter.  I think that since Jamie could see him, too, he probably was real, but then I don't know.  I just loved this book!  And I will be thinking about it and recommending it for a long time to come. 

People Like Us

People Like Us by Dominick Dunne is a book that I always wanted to read but never have.  And I still haven't.  People Like Us by Dana Mele is the book that I read!  I saw it on the shelf at the library and bought it after reading the reviews.  I am glad I did, but I know I only gave it four stars, just because I think it was a little too long for me.  But I can really recommend it.  I just wasn't SUPER wow'd by it.  But it is really good. 

Author Binge

Obviously I am on an author binge with Robert Cormier.  After the First Death was harder for me to get into at first, but once I was hooked, I was HOOKED.  It was brutal.  It was very well done.  It raises a lot of questions about service to one's country and what that might mean. 
Powerful. 

Rags and Bones

When I was reading The Rag and Bone Shop by Cormier I kept thinking about the book Ragman:  and other Cries of Faith which I read 100 years ago.  One has nothing to do with the other.
I started wondering what a "rag and bone shop" was and found this.  Now I am curious as to how the title of this book fits.  And I see that the book got its title from this.  I  need to think about this more, because I haven't yet read the poem and maybe then I will figure it out. 
This was again another "no happy endings" kind of book.  But it was excellent.  Was Cormier a pessimist or a realist?  I guess it depends on what the one asking the question is.  Some days I might see him a pessimist  and some days as a realist.  I guess on really bad days he might be an optimist!  Ha!  Great book though.  Really great. 

Not a Luke Warm Feeler

That's me.  I LOVE a book or I HATE a book, it seems.  But I am trying to be more thoughtful, more intentional, less emotional and lazy when writing about the books I've read, so I won't say that listening to All the Crooked Saints was painful.  But it was. I don't know.  Not my thing at all. 

Before and After

The Ethan I was Before has a great cover and a great title and it really is a great book.  I just thought that the end dragged just a wee-wee bit with the fox cubs.  The fox cubs were the only thing that kept this from being a 5 star for me, but I get why they were important.  This was an incredibly powerful book.  If there could have been some other way to work in heroism/sacrifice by Coralee, for me, this would have been one of the best books I read all year.  Highly recommended, but the foxes just took a lot a way for me. 

What if you could spend one last day with someone you lost? Spoilers maybe?

That's the tagline for the book Goodbye Days by Jeff Zentner.  The book is about a young man who texts his friend while his friend is driving a car filled with his other friends and his friend texts back, resulting in an accident that kills everyone in the car.  Carver Briggs is left with the grief of losing all of best friends and the guilt of being responsible.  Was he responsible?  At first I thought, "no way, not at all!" but then the book goes on to reveal that Carver did think that his friend was driving and purposely texted that friend anyway because he was the friend most likely to return his text right away.  So he did know that his friend would text him while driving.  So does that make him guilty of involuntary manslaughter?  Judges in real life have ruled that if the person texting the driver who was involved in an accident knew that the recipient of their texts was driving, they are responsible.   I am ashamedly guilty of doing this.  And I am going to stop.  I know people who put an auto block on their texts when they are driving and I get a "Driving now, will text back later," message in response.  This is a good thing!  I was trying for a while to figure out how to make my iPhone do that, but I never figured it out.  The friends I have who do this have droids.
Zentner's book is really good.  It isn't preachy.  It is diverse and inter-generational, too.  I really, really liked this book and look forward to reading more from him.

The Lord only gives you....

as much as you can handle.  Have you heard that before?  I have and it just makes me sick.  I bet it makes Jesus even sicker!  Just My Luck features the Barrows family who have been given a lot from God, if you believe that, which, I must make clear- I do not!
Thing is though, if that idea makes someone feel better about their own circumstances, then more power to them!  I would never judge someone's way of dealing.
I learned that in seminary when I read a book by Tex Sample and I have remembered this ever since:

I remember once in class I was making fun of the song “In the Garden.” Not only did I parody its lyrics as hopelessly individualistic, privatistic, and full of escapist spirituality, but I launched into singing it in a nasal voice with affront forethought. I was on a roll until after the class when a thirty-five-year-old woman approached me and told this story: “Tex, my father started screwing me when I was eleven and he kept it up until I was sixteen and found the strength somehow to stop it. After every one of those ordeals I would go outside and sing that song to myself: I go to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses, and he walks with me and talks with me and he tells me that I am his own. Without that song I don’t know how I could have survived. Tex, don’t you ever ever make fun of that song in my presence again.”4

We all deal with things in our own way.

Again, I am digressing.

Anyway, this book was just so very good.  So very, very good.

A Castrophist!

Petula is one for sure!  I can't say I blame her.   Optimists Die First was a really good story.  There are a lot of books with similar subjects, nothing new under the sun, right?  But this was a really good book and most certainly have that feeling of "why bother to write a book about this when it has already been done better?"  It's first love, and parents and fear and friendship and all of that, rolled into loss of a loved one and guilt.

Jellyfish

The thing about The Thing about Jellyfish is that the author, Ali Benjamin, MUST know what it is like to lose a best friend.  I don't know what it is like to have lost a best friend in such a devastating way as Suzy, the main character has, but I do know that loss.  The whole "how does the world go on turning" deal.
I also learned a lot about jellyfish!  I remember being a kid and stopping by a beach in North Carolina (I say "stopping by" because we never stayed at a beach, we were just passing through) and seeing a girl who had just been stung on her side by one.  It just seemed terrible!
This was really, really an excellent book.

A great find

Dan Gemeinhart was an author I found in 2016, with Some Kind of Courage.  I loved that book!  At the time I thought he was a new author, but no, I had just foolishly missed him!  Like my other amazing find of 2016, Jewel Parker Rhodes!  Scar Island was really, really fantastic!  The only sad thing about it, is that I think this might be his book for 2017 and I already read it!  I need to go back and read The Honest Truth!

Real

This is a very powerful middle-grade fiction story.  I liked it so much because the main character was likable and not likable, he was real.  Lost in the Sun is told from the POV of Trent, who has just entered middle school.  Entering middle school is bad enough, but Trent also is bringing with him a lot of baggage.  The winter before he shot a puck during a hockey game that hit a kid in the chest and the kid died.  It wasn't the fault of the puck, or Trent, the kid had a heart problem, but Trent blames himself.  He is full of so much rage against himself that he takes it out on the world.  This is also a story of friendship, as Trent becomes friends with a girl who has a scar on her face and is often the butt of jokes at school.  It is also the story of family, as Trent's dad has a new wife and she is having a baby.  Trent's dad comes across as a super-jerk, in my opinion.  He was super-easy to dislike has he is a seriously dualistic thinker and tells Trent that you only get one chance in life at most things, and of course, Trent, having had his part in the freak accident that resulted in the death of a friend, well, this man is just not a nice or smart man.  Also Trent can't read.  It is a book packed with things to discuss and it is also just a very compelling tween read.

A Nightmare

Not the book itself.  I enjoyed Blackwater.  Eve Bunting is an awesome, diverse writer.  I especially loved Smoky Night and Fly Away Home and In the Haunted House but I don't include picture books in my blog or on goodreads.  If you have read Smoky Night and Fly Away Home, you know that Bunting's books aren't always happy books.  They are real books, that deal with tough topics, but they aren't preachy.  They are just real.  Blackwater was so real it was scarier than Dracula.
Brody is responsible for the death of one fellow classmate and the disappearance of another in the violent river that runs through their town.  The book is set in California, and I know they name another river, but it reminds me of the song, Kern River.  Brody doesn't tell of his actions at first and so he is tortured because everyone keeps calling him a hero, but he knows the truth.  His cousin, a troubled kid from San Fran, has told his heroic story about how Brody tried to save the kids and now Brody believes he is trapped in the lie.
Brody's dad is the town preacher.  As a former church pastor, I feel that Brody's dad isn't as involved as a real pastor would be and he offers terrible theological advice, "God never gives you more than you can handle."  Really?  But the pastoral part of the book is an interesting addition, if not realistic from the platitude said by Brody's dad and the minimal involvement of the local pastor in such a tragic event. This book is great but man it is tough.